How is the micromanagement in 2.2.3/4?

[Dr. B]

Hi

I have not yet upgraded to Le Guin or bought the Megacorp expansion. As a busy guy with small kids and much work, time for playing is limited at best. Seeing the forum feedback, it seems like a very good idea to wait a bit for the usual post-release cleanup.

But one thing bother me. With the removal of tiles and all, there should be less micromanagement. I hate micro with a passion, and want the AI or sector/planet management to handle things for me.

I want to play a game where I can focus on grand strategy, not moving 3000+ population units and newly created ships around for 10 hours.

Is Stellaris better now, with sector management, planet buildings, overall automation? Can a play this game now without being bogged down in micro hell?

 

[Rhym3z]

Thankfully Le Guin removed a lot of micro which is rather refreshing.
However it introduced ai issues with sectose etc.
These issues are fixed with the glavious ai mod from the steam workshop though, which I recommend everyone to get.

 

[Ariphaos]

It's micro, but it feels less like micro. The game penalizes you for moving too fast. If you try to make it into a clickfest (upgrade several buildings, build a bunch of buildings / districts at once, move pops the moment they show up, etc) the game actively punishes you. By yanking the base of your economy out from beneath you, adding more to your sprawl than you could otherwise get away with, etc.

It could certainly still be improved (and the AI is in... a state), but it is vastly better.

2.2.3 and the beta patch are still pretty heavily bugged.

 

[permeakra]

Sectors - you have direct control over all buildings and it is okish. Single big sectors are gone. Unfortunately, you can't pre-build planets anymore as in addition to maint. cost, buildings slots open with increase of population.
Pops - AI does OKish job in empires with homogenous population. If you want, it is relatively easy to have 2-tier society with lower and upper caste using slavery and with syncretic evolution civic it is a nice option.

2.2 introduced new chellenges - overpopulation and unemployment - for which you have to plan in advance or use a lot of resettlement micro. It also reworked migration.

I would suggest to stay out of LeGuin at least untill 2.2.4 goes live, since at the moment it has several gamebreaking bugs.

 

[KingAlamar]

Hi

I have not yet upgraded to Le Guin or bought the Megacorp expansion. As a busy guy with small kids and much work, time for playing is limited at best. Seeing the forum feedback, it seems like a very good idea to wait a bit for the usual post-release cleanup.

But one thing bother me. With the removal of tiles and all, there should be less micromanagement. I hate micro with a passion, and want the AI or sector/planet management to handle things for me.

I want to play a game where I can focus on grand strategy, not moving 3000+ population units and newly created ships around for 10 hours.

Is Stellaris better now, with sector management, planet buildings, overall automation? Can a play this game now without being bogged down in micro hell?

Actually I'm doing a LOT LOT more micro now than I ever did before. In the past it was pretty easy to pre-build and pre-plan a planet just the way you wanted it. Once you set up the framework you could reliably hand that over to the Sector AI and it would handle upgrades for you as long as they had enough energy/minerals/etc.

Now that you're penalized for trying to pre-build and are forced into "just-in-time" management that's added this near constant planet scan loop that doesn't add any difficult decisions but certainly chews up a lot of time. Then there's also scanning to verify your piracy patrols are covering the right areas. Lets not mention issues with population management / job management / etcl that is its own new constant loop.

EDIT: Summary -- You do make the grand decisions BUT you also play the role of high and mid-level bureaucrat at the moment. Fortunately there's a TON of room to develop tools / aids within the UI to help with some of the "needless" micro.

 

[Roddo]

I don't know what everyone else is talking about, this is IMO the version of the game with the most micro as of yet. And be prepared because it's here to stay.

 

[sillyrobot]

I found the micro intensified for my playstyle.

Since I tend to play in short bursts when I get to play, the old paradigm of "plop a building on tile, fill the world if you can then give to the AI to upgrade" far more simple to handle than the new paradigm of "sweep down the outliner list of planets opening each planet with idle pop or needing to upgrade its admin building. Work out if a new district/building/forced resettlement is warranted. Click though the necessary steps then move to the next planet" followed by "turn on the map visualisation of trade routes to validate no sneaky pirates are building up anywhere".

 

[Masoz]

Pop growth is king.

But you need to resettle a billion times to take full advantage of it. I find it way worse than the tile micro ever was.

They need to make sectors handle resettling somehow because it's insane.

 

[Rhym3z]

I don't know what everyone else is talking about, this is IMO the version of the game with the most micro as of yet. And be prepared because it's here to stay.

I never understood this, at all. I am interested however how there is more micro?
Every single playthrough since le guin all I've done is sat there doing literally nothing until a pop grows. A pop is grown, I look at what I require resources wise at the top bar and place the required building, then it's back to doing 0 until a new pop arrives.
There's no reason to constantly keep checking planets.
I don't ever check trade routes for piracy either. If pirates arrive I deal with them, then setup a single corvette patrol. Done. It's far far less clicking and far less caring required until a pop is grown.
I'm genuinely interested in the other side of things though. Most of the time I can't help but feel like "your doing it wrong" when I see peolpe say there's more macro lol

 

[Mastikator]

The mid-game is now more interesting as planets are far more detailed, but if you ever get into 40+ planets the game turns into a micro nightmare since planets are never truly "done" like they were before.

 

[roman566]

There are two schools of thought on 2.2+ micro:

Meh, it will work out. Eventually.

In this approach, you ignore the 'bad micro' and only build new stuff when needed. Your economy will become powerful. Eventually. People with this approach do not complain about micro because they don't do it. Usually played by either single race style or full xenophobia with xeno compatibility. In those cases, people only have to watch for the right amount of jobs for their pops as the system should place right pops in the right jobs. Should being the keyword.

Oh boy, oh boy, I got 5% more resources from my planet!

Or 'resettlement button is your friend'. In this approach, you move pops around. A lot. Filling a new colony to 10 pops for the capital upgrade is the basic stuff. Usually accompanied by slavery, robots, gene modding or combination of them. People playing like this not much hate micro as hate the poor tools they were given to manage the planets. Want a special race for working in mines ONLY? You can gene mod pops on planet basis. Have fun shuffling pops all over the empire.

 

[sillyrobot]

I never understood this, at all. I am interested however how there is more micro?
Every single playthrough since le guin all I've done is sat there doing literally nothing until a pop grows. A pop is grown, I look at what I require resources wise at the top bar and place the required building, then it's back to doing 0 until a new pop arrives.
There's no reason to constantly keep checking planets.
I don't ever check trade routes for piracy either. If pirates arrive I deal with them, then setup a single corvette patrol. Done. It's far far less clicking and far less caring required until a pop is grown.
I'm genuinely interested in the other side of things though.

I suspect is a question of how wide people go. My last game, I had 50 colonies by 2290. About 10 had a red pop marker at any one time. Some of those were forced-unemployed pops (rulers and specialists that got displaced somehow). Some were on colonies that were effectively "finished" and the pops needed to get shifted. Then there's the resort world that always has a few unemployed because that's how they seem to work. And then there were the growing colonies where I needed to add a district/building.

So I sit down to play, and scan the 10 worlds, making 3-5 changes.

Then I scan for pirates -- my trade routes were generating up to 200 trade so much more than a single corvette patrol is necessary and the routes are well beyond being protected by any sensible number of star bases. And since the trade continually grows, so does the size of the necessary patrols -- at least until another Gateway comes online and I can reroute the trade routes through it, but that takes a couple of decades of execution so I best have planned the trade collection station placement well.

And don't get me started on assigning patrols! The routes the patrols insist upon don't match the trade routes themselves so I have to have multiple patrols each covering a leg of the route otherwise the wrong systems get patrolled.

 

[Roddo]

I never understood this, at all. I am interested however how there is more micro?
Every single playthrough since le guin all I've done is sat there doing literally nothing until a pop grows. A pop is grown, I look at what I require resources wise at the top bar and place the required building, then it's back to doing 0 until a new pop arrives.
There's no reason to constantly keep checking planets.
I don't ever check trade routes for piracy either. If pirates arrive I deal with them, then setup a single corvette patrol. Done. It's far far less clicking and far less caring required until a pop is grown.
I'm genuinely interested in the other side of things though. Most of the time I can't help but feel like "your doing it wrong" when I see peolpe say there's more macro lol

From what you say, and how to "fix" problems it seems to me you have not progressed into mid/late-game but I don't want to take anything for granted. It's quite possible you have a very different playstyle.

I'm away from home so I'll try to be brief:

The fact that I cannot leave a planet for the AI to "safekeep" as I used to do before is driving me nuts.
I DONT TRUST AI, AND I DONT WANT TO LEAVE IT ANY ROOM FOR IT TO DECIDE WHAT TO BUILD IN MY COLONIES.

So, parting from there:
Before I just built colonies up, placed all buildings and let the AI keep it without the possibility to redevelop it, and there you go, the AI just moved pops around... that wasn't so bad on my general empire status. But now.... OH BOY, I have to wait until the planet has 100 pops to build all structures, and even THEN, the planet is still unfinished.

Too many options does not mean better options, sometimes I find myself tearing down buildings that made sense at start, like holo-theaters, and then by late game when the capital gets upgraded it's completely irrelevant because "natural progression" in the tech tree has made it completely useless, so... that's another factor, planets are in constant shift (which is not bad per se, in itself is an indication of meaningful choices). I tear down the building and replace it with something else which will net me like +15 energy (because really... what can you replace it with but comertial zones?) and then it hits you: It doesn't even matter, it's irrelevant.
My colonies all have 80+ stability EVEN with overcrowding, and jobless and only with empire modifiers you can get it so high it's not even worth spending time in decision making... so it's micro... but it's meaningless micro. YES, it's micro.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE MICRO. But, I love micro to a certain point. Before as I said, there was a natural progression, and a point in which I could just STOP micro-ing and let the AI take over, now... I don't see that turning point.
So therefore, I see more micro now than ever, and mind you, it's not even GOOD micro. It's just micro.

I love the new economy system, but I strongly believe this needs a serious balancing update.

 

[~Robbie]

I'm not sure what the people saying there's the same/less micro are talking about. The game has more micro now than it even did before, by orders of magnitude. And it's here to stay, unless Paradox can find a way to automate a lot of it (hopefully they do; most of it is nothing more than busy work). If you don't like micro, Stellaris may cease being the game for you.

There are two schools of thought on 2.2+ micro:

Meh, it will work out. Eventually.

In this approach, you ignore the 'bad micro' and only build new stuff when needed. Your economy will become powerful. Eventually. People with this approach do not complain about micro because they don't do it. Usually played by either single race style or full xenophobia with xeno compatibility. In those cases, people only have to watch for the right amount of jobs for their pops as the system should place right pops in the right jobs. Should being the keyword.

Oh boy, oh boy, I got 5% more resources from my planet!

Or 'resettlement button is your friend'. In this approach, you move pops around. A lot. Filling a new colony to 10 pops for the capital upgrade is the basic stuff. Usually accompanied by slavery, robots, gene modding or combination of them. People playing like this not much hate micro as hate the poor tools they were given to manage the planets. Want a special race for working in mines ONLY? You can gene mod pops on planet basis. Have fun shuffling pops all over the empire.

You're basically saying that there are two schools of thought: people who are trying their best, and people who are not. Game design should always assume that a given player is trying their best, and doing that in 2.2.x means lots of micro is mandatory. The only way you're not going to have that micro is if you are intentionally playing sub-optimally, which is something that a game should never encourage.

And it's not just about min/maxing, either. If the AI weren't broken, the only way to be competitive at anything above the easier difficulties has a hard requirement of tons of micro.

 

[Doomy]

The best way to describe it, I think, is to say that micro scales exponentially the more planets you have and the more jobs you want each planet to have and the pops there to work.

You can spend upwards of 3 min paused in a game during the late period doing your pop migrations in micro.
In MP, this is ofc, torture. I suggest playing only on maximum mid sized galaxies with a suitable amount of players.

It is doubly worse if you have multiple pop types (or specialized machine robot pops you want to migrate that all look alike) and you want to make optimizations.

 

[xrogaan]

I'm not sure what the people saying there's the same/less micro are talking about. The game has more micro now than it even did before, by orders of magnitude. And it's here to stay, unless Paradox can find a way to automate a lot of it (hopefully they do; most of it is nothing more than busy work). If you don't like micro, Stellaris may cease being the game for you.

Agreed, I always need to do population control. It's like a game within the game. And those small tasks increases as you gain more planet, up to a point it becomes too annoying.

 

[Rhym3z]

From what you say, and how to "fix" problems it seems to me you have not progressed into mid/late-game but I don't want to take anything for granted. It's quite possible you have a very different playstyle.

I'm away from home so I'll try to be brief:

The fact that I cannot leave a planet for the AI to "safekeep" as I used to do before is driving me nuts.
I DONT TRUST AI, AND I DONT WANT TO LEAVE IT ANY ROOM FOR IT TO DECIDE WHAT TO BUILD IN MY COLONIES.

So, parting from there:
Before I just built colonies up, placed all buildings and let the AI keep it without the possibility to redevelop it, and there you go, the AI just moved pops around... that wasn't so bad on my general empire status. But now.... OH BOY, I have to wait until the planet has 100 pops to build all structures, and even THEN, the planet is still unfinished.

Too many options does not mean better options, sometimes I find myself tearing down buildings that made sense at start, like holo-theaters, and then by late game when the capital gets upgraded it's completely irrelevant because "natural progression" in the tech tree has made it completely useless, so... that's another factor, planets are in constant shift (which is not bad per se, in itself is an indication of meaningful choices). I tear down the building and replace it with something else which will net me like +15 energy (because really... what can you replace it with but comertial zones?) and then it hits you: It doesn't even matter, it's irrelevant.
My colonies all have 80+ stability EVEN with overcrowding, and jobless and only with empire modifiers you can get it so high it's not even worth spending time in decision making... so it's micro... but it's meaningless micro. YES, it's micro.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE MICRO. But, I love micro to a certain point. Before as I said, there was a natural progression, and a point in which I could just STOP micro-ing and let the AI take over, now... I don't see that turning point.
So therefore, I see more micro now than ever, and mind you, it's not even GOOD micro. It's just micro.

I love the new economy system, but I strongly believe this needs a serious balancing update.

I guess I just play differently.
As for ai problems ive been using glavious ai mod since forever and sector ai in le guin doesn't seem bad when using it. Was pretty bad when it was incompatible and I couldn't use it tho. Maybe worth trying it if you haven't already?

 

[sillyrobot]

I guess I just play differently.
As for ai problems ive been using glavious ai mod since forever and sector ai in le guin doesn't seem bad when using it. Was pretty bad when it was incompatible and I couldn't use it tho. Maybe worth trying it if you haven't already?

I have 20? sectors. I do not want to add an additional 20 steps to my micro to check the reserves of all the sectors and top them up if running low. I'm not even sure you can take resources back from them still. When 2.2 hit, I looked at sectors for 5 minutes and didn't see any obvious way.

 

[roman566]

You're basically saying that there are two schools of thought: people who are trying their best, and people who are not. Game design should always assume that a given player is trying their best, and doing that in 2.2.x means lots of micro is mandatory. The only way you're not going to have that micro is if you are intentionally playing sub-optimally, which is something that a game should never encourage.

Many threads about micro have people saying 'there is no micro, you don't have to manage every pop, only build stuff when there is unemployment, let the automation do its job, etc'. Do they play suboptimally? Of course, they do. Do they care? I don't think so.

 

[~Robbie]

Many threads about micro have people saying 'there is no micro, you don't have to manage every pop, only build stuff when there is unemployment, let the automation do its job, etc'. Do they play suboptimally? Of course, they do. Do they care? I don't think so.

It's fine if they don't care that they're playing sub-optimally. That doesn't mean that giving the players the choice between insane micro and playing sub-optimally is good gameplay design. Any given game should (and usually is) designed around the idea that players will apply themselves and try to win to the best of their ability. If people like micro, that's absolutely fine! But "micro is optional because you can always choose to play poorly" is not.

We can apply this school of thought to other genres to see how poorly it holds up. Learning combos in a fighting game might be hard and people might not like it, but you would never say "you don't need to learn combos, because you can always just choose to lose".

Or even just to other aspects of Stellaris. Building science ships isn't necessary to play, but you're just choosing to ignore a massive part of the game that will damage your success in a major way, the same as choosing to ignore the new micro.

Of course it's fine if people want to play that way, but telling people that micro is optional because they can choose not to be competitive is not true. It's only optional in the sense that you can decide not to engage with it at the cost of not playing the game well.